Balthazar shouted, “Enough!”
His booted foot landed with a solid thud on the cracked earth.
The cockroaches let out piercing shrieks and skittered back from whence they came.
My skin still prickled from where the insects had touched me. I felt clawed open, vulnerable.
Balthazar smiled. “Ready?”
“For what? What other trickery do you think you can use on us?” I said, feigning a bravado I didn’t feel.
“This.” Balthazar twisted open the vial and took another long, slow sniff. He let out a lusty “ahh,” and the bulge in his trousers jerked. He held the dagger aloft and carefully poured a drop onto the glistening blade.
The blood sizzled when it touched the metal. Balthazar began saying the time-traveling words precisely, and the dagger glowed with images before me.
“Watch,” he said, his face pulled back in a cruel visage.
“Olivia, no! Guard yourself!” Roman yelled.
But I became mesmerized when an image of my mother appeared, smiling and laughing as she looked at me. Balthazar was wrong—Mom did love me.
“Mom!” I cried out.
She held out her arms, and I longed to spread mine wide and accept her embrace.
But then, a transparent image of Balthazar appeared before my eyes with his own arms outstretched. He reached for my mom, and his body and Mom’s collided together. Mom leaped up, wrapping her legs around Balthazar’s hips and ass, and then they fucked with abandon.
“Stop it!” I shrieked. “Stop showing me this!”
I kicked against the image as Balthazar and my mom pounded their hips against one another, his fat, nasty cock impaling her.
The real Balthazar, the demon in his lair with Roman and me, stalked around the image of him and my mother fucking. As he did so, he palmed his turgid flesh through the fabric of his pants.
“Oh, I loved her so. I still do,” he said wistfully.
The image faded. Then, several scenes unfolded around me in a half-circle.
My mother stood beneath a bridge in Paris fucking some strange man. She lay on an elegant four-poster bed with velvet curtains screwing another man in another scene. The third, she was on her hands and knees while some guy thrust into her like a dog.
In all the scenes, my mother’s expression was one of rapture.
“Make these go away!” I screamed.
“Your mother got lonely when I was away,” Balthazar said, reveling in my reaction. “She had my permission to fuck freely. I, of course, killed her lovers when I returned. She never knew what happened to them, but I couldn’t risk her continuing to screw them when I had to leave.”
“You sick fuck,” I yelled. “I don’t believe it. Not a word of it.”
I longed to brush away the feeling of the cockroach legs crawling all over my body and scrape the images Balthazar had shown me from my eyes.
“This is all your mother’s life. It’s not some sort of trickery,” Balthazar said evenly. “I can show you your life just as easily or even Alexander’s.”
“Don’t believe him, Olivia,” Roman said. “It’s all mental manipulation, lies, and deception.”
I wanted to believe Roman. But, somewhere inside, I knew my mother’s blade had merely been witness to her life. It stored the memories inside its metal cells as efficiently as my brain held my life memories. I remembered what Grey Feather said about our daggers showing our past, present, and, who knew, maybe our future. What I saw was the truth. My mother was a whore, and Balthazar was her lover.
“We’ll get to your life next, gladiator,” Balthazar said to Roman.
“Like hell you will,” Roman said.
